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Recommended: Nature in poetry
William Carlos Williams shows his readers that ordinary life can be poetic.
Williams’s poems represent the simple, small, or quick occurrences in everyday life. This may be a scene, image, or event, but Williams seems to capture the essence of these ordinary items and describe them in great detail. A possible reason for these simple ideas showing up in his poems may be because he was a doctor. Doctors are taught to see the smallest details in trying to determine what is wrong with their patients, and in some cases these small issues can be very important. This may explain why Williams portrayed seemingly insignificant aspects of life as complex or important. Another possible reason for these praises in Williams’s poetry according to Poet
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This poem according to Poet Mordecai Marcus, alludes to a painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard called “The Swing” which depicts a woman swinging on swing with several women on the ground below. Behind her is a ray of light hitting her and dense forest. Also in the background of the painting there is a snowy mountain. Williams uses simple body parts of the woman and relates them to more complex aspects of nature, for example, Williams writes “Your thighs are apple trees whose blossoms touch the sky” (qtd. in “Portrait of a Lady”). Williams also compares the woman’s knees to nature when he writes “Your knees / are a southern breeze-or / a gust of snow…” (qtd. in “Portrait of a Lady”). Williams in this poem may be showing respect for this woman or in fact any woman. This may allude to Williams respect for his female patients. Professor Barry Ahearn believes Williams wrote this poem to try and address a poem of praise to the lady. Later in the poem though the lady seems to reject the praise or tries to take the attention off of her when she says “Which Shore?” (qtd. in “Portrait of a Lady”). Barry Ahearn also believes the woman in the poem seems to want a larger context for the metaphor “Your thighs are apple trees” (qtd. in “Portrait of a Lady”). The woman may have tried to take the …show more content…
Williams also describes the contrast between winter and spring, but the way that he does this makes spring and winter seem like living things. American poet John Hollander believes that, “[t]his is a poem of discovery of the gradual emergence of the sense of spring from what looks otherwise like a disease of winter.” This poem may also be Williams way of comparing good from bad, but he adds complexity to spring and winter to create a bigger impact on his readers. Williams takes simple scenes of dead plants and portrays winter as a very bad season in his statement, “Beyond, the / waste of broad, muddy fields/ brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen.” Williams describes spring as a season that is questionable in the beginning, but later is beautiful when he describes all the plants sprouting back out of the ground when he writes “One by one objects are defined- / It quickens: clarity, outline of a leaf” (qtd. in “Spring and All”). The plants in the poem are also described as complex almost like humans. Another important part of this poem is the part where Williams writes “They enter the new world naked and cold, / uncertain of all” (qtd. in “Spring and All”) This may allude to Williams respect for his female patients whose babies he delivered. Williams once said “Beauty at its best seems truth
Williams uses a lot of punctuation in his poetry. His sentences, although full of commas and semicolons, flow smoothly from line to line. He uses a lot of clauses and qualifications in his writing. Each stanza remains fresh, never becoming mundane or repetitive. He chooses words carefully, painting pictures with broad, smooth strokes rather than wispy phrases that are hard to follow.
His poems are generally humorous and his images come from tiny things such as a piece of thread, tying his shoe, or looking at his earth. Child experiences of war, poverty, and hunger...
In his poem “Field of Autumn”, Laurie Lee uses an extended metaphor in order to convey the tranquility of time, as it slowly puts an end to life. Through imagery and syntax, the first two stanzas contrast with the last two ones: The first ones describing the beginning of the end, while the final ones deal with the last moments of the existence of something. Moreover, the middle stanzas work together; creating juxtaposition between past and future whilst they expose the melancholy that attachment to something confers once it's time to move on. Lee’s objective in this poem was to demonstrate the importance of enjoying the present, for the plain reason that worrying about the past and future only brings distress.
The first three stanzas invoke the West Wind as a driving force over the land, the sky, and the ocean and implore it to “hear” the poets call for it to perform its duty. (14, 28, 42) In the first stanza the wind is characterized as a “Destroyer and preserver” (14) which drive dead leaves and the “wingèd seeds” (7) to the closing season’s burial and the coming spring’s rebirth. Within the recurring second and third stanzas Shelley extends the leaf image to additional earthen objects thus creating an epic metaphor throughout the poem.
When John Towner William was born February 8, 1932 in Floral Park, New York, no one knew what he would become, what he would create. Now, to some, he is one of if not the greatest film composer of all time. After a career spanning six decades and over 80 feature length films, Williams is known as one of the best minds in composition. Son of Johnny and Esther Williams, John relocated to the Los Angeles are in 1948. His father a jazz percussionist, Williams’ love for music was inspired from a young age. Williams studied piano as a child, and later trumpet, trombone, and clarinet. He did some work as a teenager with pianist and arranger Bobby van Epps before moving from his native New York to Los Angeles. After graduating from North Hollywood High School in 1950, he was accepted to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). While at UCLA, Williams was privately tutored by Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Tedesco, know as a revolutionary in guitar composition, composed for over 200 films produced by MGM studios. Before finishing his undergrad degree at UCLA, Williams was drafted into the United States Air Force in 1952. While enlisted, he conducted and arranged music for the US Air Force as part of his assignments (Dinneen, 2009). In 1954 he returned to New York, enrolled at the Juilliard School, and studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne. Lhévinne, one the most noted pianists of the twentieth century and a highly influential teacher, was a virtuoso performer. One of the last artists in the nineteenth-century Russian pianistic tradition, she taught some of the most famous musicians of the twentieth century, including Van Cliburn, John Browning, Mischa Dichter, Ade...
William Carlos Williams once said, “It is not what you say that matters, but the manner in which you say it.”(Examiner) This is a view he often incorporated into his poetry. Williams’ purpose through writing poetry was not to teach a moral, but to convey that simple things can be beautiful. Although many of Williams’ poems show this beauty in simplicity, a few good examples are The Red Wheel Barrow, The Great Figure, and Young Sycamore.
Williams’ minimalist writing style employed free verse and by maintaining simplicity allowed the wheelbarrow to be the center of attention. He accomplished this task by breaking up the poem, which consisted of one sentence, into eight lines and further divided it into couplets. The beginning line of each couplet was longer than the second line, which only had one word. This formation allowed the reader to focus on specific words before moving to the next line. This is best illustrated in the opening lines, “so much depends/upon,” (Williams 288). Already, Williams has established the importance of the object by conveying to the reader that many things are dependent on the object. It is also significant that none of the words in the poem are capitalized nor did Williams
New flowers blooming, baby animals, and the cold giving way to warmth, the season of spring embodies the idea of rebirth. Like nature, people have the ability to be reborn, becoming someone completely different than who they were before. In the novel, The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, the theme of rebirth is prominent throughout the story, allowing the characters to develop into who they are supposed to be.
William Carlos Williams is a leader of the Modern Poetry movement with peers such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, but broke away from it to experiment more in his own style. He was extremely creative, playing with forms and styles of writing and not restricting himself to poetry, however, which he excelled at. The subjects of his poems were not always people, but specific images, especially momentary ones. Many of his poems start with the word "The," which indicates that the poem will describe whatever follows "The" in the title. Writing was his side career to being a doctor, which was more economical at the time. His writing takes on the analytical approach that must come from his other career in the way he is able to dissect anything down to a few, intense moments when he captures his reader and both the reader and the speaker see what Williams sees. Women's roles were extremely diverse in his day, but none providing the much-deserved significance. The inconsistencies of the positions occupied by women in contemporary American society are demonstrated in the progression of his female subject's inferior place to men in "The Young Housewife" and "Portrait Of a Lady" to a more respectful view in "To a Poor Old Woman."
Williams was heavily concentrated on the minds capability of using the imagination to interpret the meaning of things, including reality. As Marc Hofstadter explained, Williams thought "…of himself as a local poet who possessed neither the high culture nor the old-world manners of an Eliot or Pound, he sought to express his democracy through his way of speaking.... His point was to speak on an equal level with the reader, and to use the language and thought materials of America in expressing his point of view." Williams knew he was an average citizen, but had been blessed with his ability to write and express his views in a manner more easily understood by his audience.
The perception that one person’s sorrow and tragedy goes unseen to the world is the central idea in the poetry of William Carlos Williams. His poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” is written as an interpretation of Pieter Brueghel’s painting. The painting is based on the Greek mythological tale of Icarus and his father, Daedalus. Williams’s uses a purposeful tone, irony, and symbolism to put emphasis on the imagery of Brueghel’s painting. The poem is written in the form of a narrative, and each stanza includes three lines with the lack of punctuation and capitalization leading to the assumption that the poem represents one extensive, run-on sentence.
From taking a look at the poem without even reading it, a reader can see there is a certain form. The poem is, “organized into a single sentence divided into four clauses.” (Youngberge 152). What caught my eye was that the stanzas are a total of four words. On the first line of every stanza there are three words. On the second line of every stanza is just one word. Why would Williams write this poem this way? Could it be to make it more appealing to the eye of the reader? It could have been to make the poem seem longer. Then it could be that writing this poem this way helps the reader see each image the writer wan...
Smith personifies Spring in the way it “nurs’d in dew” its flowers as though it was nursing its own children (“Close of Spring” 2). While it creates life, Spring is not human, because it has the ability to come back after its season has passed. Human beings grow old and die; we lose our “fairy colours” through the abrasive nature of life (“Close of Spring” 12). Smith is mournful that humans cannot be like the flowers of Spring and regain the colors of our lives after each year. Normally, in comparing the age of sensibility with nature, we see this great appreciation of nature as a whole.
Spring is a time for youth and immaturity, plants are just a thought. The speaker is angry with his friend, yet they soon overcome this problem. Then the speaker is angry with his foe, he does not tell his foe of this anger so it grows more and more each day (Grimes). Imagery and personification is used throughout the first stanza. When the speaker says “my wrath did end” I got this vivid picture of someone who was turning beat red and had steam coming out of his ears, then it was abruptly cut off and he was happy once again. Then in the last sentence of the first stanza the speaker says “my wrath did grow” this has brought about an image of someone who is so mad yet is stretching at the same time, almost as if to reach the sky, his wrath is taking over.
Through the use of similes, metaphors, and imagery Robert Frost shows us why we should be thankful to God for all that is the beauty of spring. Frost utilized all of those literary devices to further the central message in the poem. This poem can also show us to be thankful for the beauty and majesty of the spring. It sends a positive message about life, and reminds us that everything is in Gods hands. This poem clearly shows our dependency on God and our gratefulness for his creations.